


long away

by sweetestsight



Series: parallax [3]
Category: Queen (Band)
Genre: M/M, Solarpunk AU, cause there's one rando in here, gratuitous use of latin
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-08
Updated: 2019-05-08
Packaged: 2020-02-28 05:50:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,228
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18750292
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sweetestsight/pseuds/sweetestsight
Summary: Roger and Brian take a trip to the market. They both gain something unexpected along the way.





	long away

**Author's Note:**

> I know there seem to be a lot of weird planet names going around but I swear there are only a few at the moment, I just keep giving them weird nicknames. Their official names are gonna be the name of the star and then the number that the planet is in the system. Here’s a little rundown thus far: 
> 
> Sirius-1/Primus/Terra Nova: Freddie’s home planet, and also Kana and that kiddo from the mines in night follows day
> 
> Sirius-2/Secunda/Lupus: another planet in that system
> 
> Calderas-4: John’s home planet. Picture a kind of boring blue-collar suburb
> 
> Deneb-3: the capital of the republic 
> 
> Regulus-3: Roger’s home planet. It’s only been mentioned so far but will come up more later
> 
> Virida/Terra Sperum: basically just the name for a kind of promised land. It isn’t really an actual location, it’s just an idea: somewhere peaceful and green where there’s no pollution or hard labor. It’s only been mentioned so far

Kana, they call her.

She had a name before, but nobody remembers it. Possibly the new is an abbreviation of the old, or perhaps the other way around. It’s impossible to tell. She’s so old she’s long forgotten and anyone who knew her at that time is no doubt dead, anyway. Sirius-1 was not a kind place to everyone.

Despite that, despite all that she’s seen and all that she can pick apart with her crinkled eyes, she is kind. Her hands are warm and weathered, her fingers smooth as they trace over Roger’s palm. The motion is familiar, just like the bustle of the market around him and the smells of exotic spices in the air; just like the heat of this forsaken speck of dirt orbiting some little-known star in Orion, just like the blinding white sand outside. It settles him and calls back every single time he’d felt it before.

_I don’t believe in that sort of thing,_ Brian had said what felt like ages ago. _No offense, ma’am._

_None taken,_ she’d replied, eyes crinkling. _What about you then, handsome? Do you believe in the superstitions of an old woman?_

_It’s more than that,_ Freddie had said behind her, affronted. She’d laughed.

The market was bigger back then, or maybe Roger was just younger. It had smelled the same and the dirt beneath the stalls had muted his footsteps in the same way. The sun was blinding outside and a little too close, the heat scorching outside of the protection of the billowing burlap canopies. All around people bickered over prices and called out about their wares, Freddie’s voice mixing in among them.

He hadn’t been shouting the first time they’d met, though. It had been long past sundown and he’d been singing softly to himself, his voice beckoning Roger closer like a beacon—and Roger had followed, helpless against it.

They were all younger then.

Kana traces his palm again thoughtfully. “Lost them, have you?” she murmurs.

“You can tell that just from my hand?”

“If you really think I needed to read your palm to know that then you must think I’m quite stupid.”

“I think you’re a wonderful seer. You should nod along next time,” he says with an impish smile. She pinches his cheek before looking down again, serious in the space between heartbeats.

“You’ve still got the believer with you,” she says conversationally.

That’s what she calls Brian: believer. Believer of what, she’s never said.

_Cryptic as all else,_ John had muttered late one night during a tea break between repairs, and Freddie had laughed.

_Oh, come off it, darling._

_It’s just ridiculous. He doesn’t believe in that mumbo-jumbo any more than I do._

_Don’t be mad just because you don’t like your own nickname. Just because she calls you—_

“The little one, he’s missing. And Sparrow.”

_Sparrow_. She’s always called Freddie that, the vowels coming out oddly light. When he’d asked Freddie about it he’d just gotten a curiously bashful smile in return. He sighs at the memory. “Yeah, both of them. I have barely any idea where to start. I thought it would be best to ask you.”

“Barely any idea is still some idea,” she hums with a tilt of her head.

“I don’t want to even think about it.”

“Then it’s better than just an idea. Ideas don’t cause us fear unless they have some grain of truth.”

“Kana,” he says quietly. “Please.”

She raises her eyebrows but takes his hand again. “The believer should be doing this, not you.”

“He doesn’t think it’s real.”

“He has much to learn. Perhaps he should take a trip to Nova Terra.”

That startles a laugh out of him. “After everything Freddie said about it he’d never.”

“And what has Sparrow said?”

Not much, granted. Freddie was never one to talk about his home planet. “He said he didn’t know it long before he left. He was a kid. What he remembered of it was mostly barren.”

“There’s beauty in destruction.”

“You don’t believe that.”

“It’s hard to, when you were almost part of the destroyed. Sparrow was lucky.”

There it is again, those airy vowels. It’s been too long since he’d heard them—too long since he’d visited Orion at all, and he feels bad for that. He’d missed her.

“The little one is in darkness. I know that.”

“How?” he breathes.

She traces a line on his hand. “Dreamer, you know how.”

“Tell me again.”

“In the beginning you were all one being, living and breathing and burning. What has been one will be one again. That’s what we believe, what we know. You were all pieces of the same star once upon a time, the same first molecules that collided in blinding light, and as you once were you will always be. Every piece of you calls to every piece of them. It’s impossible to ignore.”

“I can’t even see it.”

She shrugs. “You have to know what to look for, I suppose. I know your Believer is nearby. I can hear him wishing he was closer to you and I can see the way you’re calling to him even now, even without realizing it. You guys are either touching or wishing you were.”

He blushes. “And John?”

“His gravity is weakened—” and she soothes a thumb over Roger’s palm when he stiffens “—but he is still there, still searching. He is reaching for you and when he gets nothing he recoils back into himself. It’s black and cold and dark, wherever he is. He’s screaming with it, reaching and reaching,” she taps her thumb against the center of his hand, “to right here.”

“He’s alive?”

“Alive. Unhappy and weak, but he’s alive.”

He lets out a breath, then he’s almost scared to ask. “And Freddie.”

She smiles. “Our Sparrow was always smart with this stuff. He could feel the pull years away, you know. Even as a little boy he knew. Stars are always drawn back together.”

“Can you feel him?”

“Feel him? Not like I can feel the rest of you,” she clarifies. “He lets nothing through. He’s smart that way. I know he’s there but I can’t tell what he’s doing or how he is.”

“Give me anything. Please. Anything that you think will help.”

“Well, he’s smart about this but he’s smart about other things, too,” she says, pulling out a notebook. “I could try to figure out what he’s thinking, or I could just tell you about a message off a slaver ship I intercepted this morning. It came from the same direction that I can feel him calling from.”

“What?”

“He sent you coordinates, love. Do you have a pen?”

Two minutes later his left arm is covered in numbers, sleeve rolled up to help the ink dry as he searches the market for Brian. For a second he entertains the idea of reaching out to him, reaching in the way Kana reaches out, but he doesn’t even really know how. The old traditions of the Sirius system never reached him far away on Regulus. His home world was dominated by work where Freddie’s was half-asleep and dying slowly from the stagnation—well, but at least they had time to dream.

He’s startled out of his thoughts by running bodily into Brian.

“Roger—” he says, then smiles his first real smile for what feels like weeks. It’s small and hesitant, but it’s still there. “Roger, look,” he says, and holds up a corroded hunk of metal that Roger distantly recognizes as an old motorbike carburetor. It’s been turned on its side to hold some soil and an oddly fuzzy plant sporting star shaped periwinkle flowers.

“Is that from the Old World?”

“Yeah, from heirloom seeds. They haven’t been cross bred or anything. Isn’t it amazing?”

Roger snorts, but he can’t stop a smile from creeping out. “How many credits did you spend on that?”

“None. I got it from a merchant from Sirius Prime. He just wanted a song for it.”

“Are you sure you didn’t just sing your soul away?”

Brian smacks him. “Don’t be rude. How’d the meeting go?”

“It went fine.” He holds out his arm. “Got a lead, anyway.”

He’s expecting to be teased. Brian never was one to trust superstition, and even the suggestion that they come here was met with skepticism. He doesn’t get that, though. Instead Brian frowns and wraps his fingers around Roger’s wrist, pulling it closer to read the numbers there.

Roger shivers when he runs a finger over one. “What?”

“She didn’t tell you where this is?”

“She didn’t know,” he shrugs. He fights the urge to follow Brian’s gentle tug and fall into his space, then realizes there’s no reason he shouldn’t do just that and allows himself to lean a little closer. “Why? Do you know it?”

“I might,” he says slowly. “I think I know a system along that parallel, anyway.”

“That’s good then, right?”

“If it’s the system I’m thinking of then no, not really.”

It’s Roger’s turn to frown. “Do you want to elaborate on that?”

“Smuggler’s moons,” Brian says, and Roger shivers again. “Experimental terraforms that nobody wanted to live on. Black markets, stolen goods, interstellar sex trade...”

“Learn all that in class, did you?”

He shrugs.

“If people know that’s going on why don’t they do anything about it?”

“Stellar winds quicken all ships,” he replies, voice measured and flat like he’s quoting a textbook. “All commerce is good commerce in the eyes of the capital. You think politicians don’t have an interest in illicit trades?”

“And that’s where they’ve taken Freddie,” Roger murmurs.

Brian’s eyes widen. “Freddie’s there?”

“That’s what she said. She said he was calling to us from the place that those coordinates were sent from.”

“She can’t know that,” Brian says firmly, but the panic in his eyes and the way his grip tightens gives him away.

Roger chews his lip for a moment, studying his eyes. He looks a little less tired today, and that’s good. They need to be sharp for what comes next. Planning, traveling, pulling this off—or trying to, anyway.

No. They will.

“It’s a smuggler’s moon,” he says slowly. “Freddie’s a political deviant. All of us are. You know we have bounties on our heads. Renegades are 80,000 credits turned in directly to the capital, last time I checked.”

“Freddie’s bounty is 85.”

Roger frowns at that, stopping short. “What did he do to get the extra five grand?”

“Beats me. Something to do with the commissar’s brand new speeder and some tea that turned out to be laced with hard drugs.”

Roger huffs a laugh and waves his hand. “Okay, 85. Whatever. The point is he’s a wanted man. Why would they take him to a smuggler’s moon? They can’t turn him in there.”

Brian nods slowly in understanding. “They don’t know who he is. We’re under the radar, figuratively.”

“If he’s there— _if_ he’s there—they want him for something else. I don’t think you and I are any good against the entire fucking capital, but we can sweet talk our way past a couple of outlaws.”

 “Yeah. Okay. Yeah, if he’s there then it’s worth a shot, isn’t it? If they have him then we can do this.”

As soon as he hears the words he allows himself to sag a little. This is possible, or at least Brian thinks so. That’s all that matters.

“Hey,” Brian whispers and pulls him closer until Roger is pressed against his chest. “It’s alright. We’ve got this.”

Just once, without the weight of it all pressing down around him, he allows himself to falter.

Then he thinks of the way Freddie laughs.

He thinks of John’s eyes, green one second and grey the next.

He remembers the four of them asleep in their quarters on the ship. He remembers the warmth of them. He remembers the way they taste, the way Brian looks at them, remembers watching the three of them work together, talk to each other, touch each other. He remembers all that.

He remembers the last time he saw them all together. He remembers the haze in Brian’s eyes as he woke up this morning, the few blissful seconds that it lingered before reality came crushing down again and they were filled once more with a grief that he never quite succeeds in shaking these days.

Their sweethearts are out there somewhere. Freddie is on some shithole moon and they don’t even know where John is at all—somewhere dark and damp, somewhere hopeless and lonely.

He sniffs and Brian’s scent comes to him as he does: clean soap and sweat from the desert heat, the earthy smell from the little makeshift flower pot he’s holding.

“What kind of plant is it?” he mumbles.

“Starflower,” Brian murmurs, then kisses the top of his head. “Borage. They call it both. In the Old World they used to use it for depression.”

“Yeah?”

“That’s what the vendor said.”

“You’re a starflower.”

“I like that better than ‘believer,’” Brian says, and Roger snorts.

“Come on,” he says, pulling away and tugging him toward the edge of the bazaar. “Let’s go. We’ve got places to be.”

Brian takes his hand. Together they cross the white sands to where the ship looms in the distance.

**Author's Note:**

> I'm sorry for all the latin references but I'm having fun with it. Up next: the lads take a trip to rescue a certain damsel in distress off a smuggler's moon.
> 
> Questions/comments/concerns? Let me know what you think!!


End file.
